10 areas where CPAs can add value, grow their practice and serve stakeholders

January 14, 2021 1:45 PM

Hindsight is 20/20 and 2021 is finally here. Already the year is showing signs of increased demand for services that CPAs provide internally and externally to organizations and stakeholders that they serve. In order to be able to provide the level of service, respond promptly and adapt to changes, CPAs must continuously build their toolboxes, shift their mindsets and think outside the box to deliver.

Let’s discuss 10 areas CPAs can focus on, in four categories. The first category is the 4 Ts: technology, thought leadership, tax strategy and toolboxes. The second category is the 3 Ps: people, process and profit. The third category is the 2 As: accountability and advocacy. The fourth and last category is the 1 C: communication.

Technology

Technology is an area that requires continuous monitoring and assessment. Leveraging technology to do higher-level work and provide more insight is important, especially in this day and age when we have so many changes that we have to adapt to and issues that we need to respond to. This year, CPAs have to make sure they are ready, technology-wise, for “busy season.”

Let’s take a step back and assess the processes: how long processes take, what the pain points are of the processes and what the bottlenecks are. CPAs must try to use automation to resolve these issues. CPAs need to make sure they are keeping abreast of developments in innovation. Firms must assign or retain a person or organization within their firm, professional community and/or advisory board that keeps current on the new developments, updating and advising them regularly to ensure the firm is performing processes as effectively as possible.

Thought leadership

Everything that we want to accomplish in our personal and professional lives can be accomplished with the right mindset. One can have all the best tools, technology and team in the world, but without the right mindset, it doesn’t matter. If you do not have the right mindset, leadership skills and thought process, you are not going to be able to be successful beyond the optics. You will not be able to be successful and grow in a sustainable way. Make sure you are proactive, not reactive, that you think things through from the 30,000-feet view as well as from the factory floor and everything in between. Make sure that insight is there. Make sure decisions are not being made simply based on our limited personal experiences or cookie-cutter solutions. Make sure decisions are thought-out plans, executed in ways that foster environments that lead to success and can be sustained. All of this matters. Thought leadership is a process.

Tax strategies

The stimulus packages, possible tax policy changes and regular nuances of tax planning make this year a year when it is more critical than ever to be able to advise clients and other stakeholders CPAs serve on how they can implement tax strategies. Oftentimes CPAs do not have a comprehensive plan for how to sell tax planning to clients. Giving clients piecemeal information is a disservice to the client and the CPA. As things continue to develop on the U.S. tax policy front, CPAs can use blogs, podcasts and webinars to inform their clients about the changes and how the changes affect them, instead of having their clients reach out to them. This does not mean you have to do it yourself or have your firm take on this task alone. You can leverage other practitioners, consultants, contractors, etc., and use the resources that they have, making those resources available to them.

Think of it as subscribing to a library that all of your stakeholders can use, as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel and taking time out of your day to keep abreast of everything. Having robust templates and technical resources can help CPAs spend more time helping clients plan out how to leverage the Tax Code as part of wealth building and business scaling, and less time to deal with tax compliance and tax preparation.

Toolbox

People will often set something up and not do any maintenance on it. They then figure out that they are missing pieces. Think of when you buy electronics. You do not expect to keep the electronic device for more than two years, but you end up keeping the device for five years. Let’s say it’s an old laptop that’s still functioning because you only use it to do a few personal tasks. You didn’t buy extra chargers or get extra memory. Suddenly, you need a new charger and more storage space. You aren’t able to upgrade the laptop because it’s too old and the accessories are no longer sold.

If you had purchased extra accessories for the laptop when you first purchased it, you would not be in this situation. Always plan to get spare parts of things you need to get the job done. Always make sure you regularly replace your equipment before you have to. Make sure you’re not just doing things to do them, and that you aren’t amassing different subscriptions, programs and tools for the sake of having them.

Let’s use the example of offering advisory services for PPP funds and other funding. You can create all of the reports on your own. You can create letters, engagement letters and proposals manually each time a client reaches out to you. Or, you can be proactive and prepare them beforehand, doing a back of the envelope calculation to figure out which clients are eligible for the next round of funding and be proactive in reaching out to them to ask if they want to sign up for a bundled service or special advisory engagement. That way it’s not a piecemeal ordeal, with clients reaching you at all hours for information and assistance. Leveraging technology and having an application you can use to quickly send out proposals, having report templates that you can quickly use to calculate what your client's funding needs are — those are things you can do to streamline the process to spend more time adding value to clients and less time doing grunt and administrative work. You could just reach into your toolbox and provide the value-added service.

Training should be done continuously. You should not be scrambling to provide training for your staff, clients or stakeholders. You do not have to create all the training yourself or at your firm. You should have a few go-to training providers, some who are broad, others that are specific to your niche, and others who are specific to practice management, etc. You should also have a team that helps you with sales, marketing and branding. You can be the best and the greatest in your area of expertise, but if your ideal clients do not know you exist or what you are capable of doing for them, you can lose out. If other CPAs are doing business across the globe, and you are limiting yourself to just local engagements, then you really have to take a look and see how you can brand yourself and make sure you broaden your reach. Make sure your toolbox is filled with things to help.

People

You want your business to make money, but if all you do is make money, then you’re not really in the value-adding business. Your business should be adding value. Your business should be making an impact. Your business should be playing a part in contributing to the growth in your profession.

In the past, people were used to being ruled by managers who exercised fear based on authority. These managers told employees they should feel lucky to have a job, that there were a hundred people waiting to sign up for the job. These managers told employees to do their jobs and keep their heads down, give their opinions when they were told what it was. We are no longer living in times when this type of leadership style is acceptable or tolerated in work-related environments.

Oftentimes, managers and leaders of today are caught up in high-level executive duties and business administration matters. This alienates the managers and leaders from the “factory floor” and removes them from being exposed to the day-to-day front-line client and stakeholder interactions. Because these leaders and managers do not regularly interact with employees who do the grunt work or service the clients and stakeholders, they don’t receive the insight that junior and non-managerial staff members can provide.

There are various things managers and leaders can do to give agency, visibility and a voice to non-managerial staff. CPAs can offer advice to junior advisory boards and platforms where the people who are on the front line serving the clients, the entry-level staff, the lower-level managers and administrative staff can voice their opinions and present ideas to managers and leaders. Non-managerial staff may have a lot of great ideas on how to improve a process that someone who sits in the ivory tower and C suite may not have.

Diversity, equity and inclusion have become buzzwords within the accounting profession and work-related spaces as a whole. People often only do things at work that will reward them monetarily and status-wise. You will see certain people only speaking to people who have roles that are at levels higher than theirs, for example, their boss, their boss’s boss, the owner or most senior executive of the company. You will see certain people only speaking to their staff when they need something instead of building a rapport. There are a lot of busy times within the accounting profession. People may not want to chit-chat while they have a deadline to meet and work to complete. When it comes to diversity, because a lot of women of color are underrepresented, underpaid, overworked and under-supported, they may not be able to connect with people who are decision makers. Since women of color may not have access to people of influence within their organizations, they may not get the exposure needed to gain the sponsorship to obtain a promotion or a seat at the table. When women of color are pigeonholed into roles doing grunt work, while other people have close-knit relationships with the boss and decision makers, they continue to get work that has performance metrics based on output instead of impact and potential. If you do not have access to people of influence within your organization, you cannot build strong business relationships with them and will not secure projects that will give you high visibility to advance.

There has to be a more authentic, proactive and intentional initiative to make diversity, equity and inclusion a living, breathing passion project, and not just an initiative that throws crumbs at people when there are holidays to be celebrated and diverse hires to pacify. People should go out of their way to include people who are different from them in what is important for the company. For example, a seasoned CPA can take a junior-level staffer to shadow them at meetings, mentor someone from a different company who is an aspiring CPA, or initiate annual scholarship drives to benefit underrepresented accounting candidate groups. People can make a personal commitment to ensure they acknowledge colleagues in all walks of life, backgrounds and levels, but make it a habit to greet people from other groups and provide cross-functional training and meetings.

Lastly, when it comes to people, the workforce has changed, and we all have a role to play in change management. People are doing a lot of brain work, not grunt work. People are utilizing more technology and soft skills to do their work. Expecting people to go from doing 15 hours of data entry to doing 15 hours of data analysis is not realistic or sustainable. One will become fatigued from information overload and cross-eyed from staring at data. Workplaces have to become more flexible. We are not running kindergarten class here, where everyone should leave happy and take naps. The nature of work has changed, and our work should leverage technology and embrace more flexibility so people can have great careers and great lives.

Process

Process is very important. If you hire brilliant, proactive, emotionally and culturally intelligent, newly minted graduates to join your organization, and you make them sit there making copies, chasing payments, doing things that are mundane because your processes are not up to par, then you will lose them. No one wants to spend five years or so obtaining 150 hours, sit for the CPA Exam and go to work to do mundane work that adds little value to the organization, clients and stakeholders. Your processes are part of employee retention, whether you realize it or not. Some companies have tried to mitigate their processes by outsourcing the grunt work. Outsourcing work without a plan is not effective either. You have to have good systems in place before you outsource work. You have to outsource work to organizations that also have efficient processes. Otherwise, you are wasting your company’s resources.

For example, if your organization has been retained to process a client’s payroll, and your client is still using manual timesheets that need to be mailed to your office and manually entered into an Excel spreadsheet that later gets formatted and imported into a payroll processing system, the process is inefficient. You employees will get bored and stressed. Your organization may experience delays in processing payroll during critical payroll deadlines and busier times. In this day and age, there are many applications you can help clients implement to ensure timesheets are captured, approved, submitted and processed electronically. That way, your staff can add value to clients by assisting with issues such as processing special leave, providing onboarding and exiting assistance, etc. When processes are made more efficient, your firm can add value, use value pricing, retain staff and be of service and a resource to stakeholders.

Profits

Businesses are supposed to earn revenue and help the stakeholders involved build wealth and improve their financial wellness, financial position and financial freedom. Easier said than done. Cash management and growth are important to your practice management strategic plans and to the level of service you want to offer those you serve. If you don’t have a grasp on your profits, and understand the cost to retain a client or complete a service for a client, if you don’t know what your overhead and fixed costs are, if you don’t know the cost to scale your business, you are at a loss. If you don’t have tools to forecast different scenarios in real time, you do not have the necessary information to make decisions that impact the finances of your firm. CPAs need to make sure the information we provide clients is useful and timely. We also need to ensure the information we use in-house is useful and timely. Your practice should model what you want your clients to have. For example, in a perfect world, if you have a consulting firm that helps other CPAs scale their businesses to achieve multimillion-dollar revenue, to turn around any onboarding of new clients within two days, and to be able to complete projects for clients within 45 days, your clients should receive that level of service as well.

How do you ensure you can be profitable when offering new services and products? You create a beta program to test the service or product and use the customer experience, research and industry insight to perfect the service and product before rolling it out to the public or your clients.

Accountability

Accountability is critical. While we attempt to create more collaborative work environments, add more value to our teams, etc., we must hold others and ourselves accountable. For example, when you service your clients, you must have a structure that handles all administrative tasks automatically, allows clients to provide and follow up on information document requests, and send them reminders about deadlines and outstanding items. When you leverage technology, it doesn’t become a cumbersome task. You should strive to not have employees chasing payments, documents and requests. You should strive to set clear expectations of clients before onboarding them so they understand how your firm works and what is expected of them to work with you. After all, you want to deliver value-added services, not continuous requests for the same information and past due invoices.

Think of baking a cake. Are you going to start baking the cake while you are missing the eggs? You cannot just make the rest of the egg batter, send someone off to the store to buy eggs, put the batter in the oven and then throw scrambled eggs on top of the cake. This is a bad analogy, but it illustrates what happens when we start doing client work before having all of the components and tools we need. When clients give you requested information in piecemeal fashion, the work becomes inefficient. When you leverage technology to have better workflow and client interactions, you can get a clear sense of what’s missing from client requests and can automate the reminders, etc. Holding your clients accountable makes it a different ballgame. Not being afraid of parting ways with clients who do not follow directions, do not provide information on a timely basis and do not pay you in a timely way may be challenging, but you have to ensure you are abiding by the boundaries and structures you set forth for your firm and make exceptions a rare occasion. If you realize that client issues or delays are caused by a break in your processes, bottlenecks in your workflow, or internal issues with your team, work to correct the issues, try to repair the client relationship and protect your business reputation.

Advocacy

When people hear the word advocacy, they think of public servants, politicians, lobbyists, pro-bono legal services, among other things. You don’t have to become a martyr or servant leader to advocate for others in your circle of influence. You can serve where you are. For example, as a member of professional accounting associations, you are represented by the governance of those organizations when their leaders advocate for financial policies and request more guidance on financial matters. Think of how CPAs advocated for the deductibility of expenses paid for with PPP funds. Another example of advocacy is if you’re a CPA who is an educator and you join groups and causes that petition for making financial literacy and personal finance education mandatory topics to be taught to students from K-12 and in college.

If you work as an in-house CPA, regardless of your role, you still are a trusted professional. You can help cross-functional teams and different levels of management make more financially sound, sustainable and fair decisions. For example, you can use insights gained from walking the factory floor and interacting with cross-functional teams to facilitate discussions on investments that need to be made to make work more efficient and to ensure that tools workers need to do their jobs do not stop operating, etc. By fixing a broken process, you are helping people free up their time and energy, and you are helping the organization save money and retain employees.

Communication

Communication is critical. Being transparent and keeping stakeholders informed matters. People want to stay abreast of recent developments and understand how changes affect them. People want to know what to expect, what the financial consequences are, and what the worst-case scenario is. As a trusted professional, you must be the voice of reason and truth.

Active listening is critical. As a CPA you will need to have strong interpersonal and soft skills to gain a wealth of knowledge about circumstances that affect stakeholders. Whether you are working in-house, serving external clients, leading a team, facilitating training, or volunteering on a nonprofit board, you must foster trust and make stakeholders feel heard.

In conclusion

As CPAs, it is our job to protect the public and serve stakeholders. It is our job to provide timely and useful information to those who engage us and seek our services. It is our job to practice professional skepticism and to manage our teams. CPA stands for Certified PUBLIC accountant. With all that is changing in our profession during the digital age, the fourth industrial revolution, the pandemic and remote virtual workplace, we must hone in on our strengths, mitigate our weaknesses, and adapt to change, all while providing value-adding, forward thinking, real-time information to our clients, colleagues, collaborators and other stakeholders.

May 2021 be a year where you and your practice grow and become more efficient in all of these 10 areas. May you leverage technology to free up resources so you can better serve clients and experience a better quality of life. May you have a great “busy season.”

(On Nov. 30, 2020, I self-published two books on Amazon. One of the books relates to advisory services. In Advisory Pearls of Wisdom: Tales, Tips, and Thoughts as Told by a CPA Who Has Worn Many Hats, I share tales, tips and thought leadership to set the stage for building an advisory practice. I discuss how you can shift your mindset from taking orders and working off a script by others, to set the stage for your own success.)